


Le Balafre

by W1tchmom



Category: Buster Keaton - Fandom, Le Roi des Champs Elysees
Genre: F/M, Listen if tptb aren't gonna give us Jim's backstory I'm gonna make that shit up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-07 15:05:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15910701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/W1tchmom/pseuds/W1tchmom
Summary: How Jim le Balafre got his name.





	1. Chapter 1

“Good Morning, Jim!” The blonde beamed at him as the bells above the door to the corner shop jingled over his head.

“Good morning, Simone,” he muttered, attempting a grin.  
“The usual?” She asked sweetly, already whirling around on her toes to fetch a box of cigarettes. He grunted in affirmation.

“You look so glum today.” She leaned over the counter, resting her chin in her hand and blinking up at him. “More glum than usual, I mean.”

“I usually look glum?”

She shrugged with a coquettish tilt of her chin. Coming to this shop to buy cigarettes and soak in Simone’s flirting was a part of his routine that Jim never would skip, no matter how hungover he was, or how sick, or how angry. Every day he woke up and stumbled out into the street, first thing, to find her. Jim may have been a celebrity amongst the police and the Milieu, the criminal underground of Paris that hid in plain sight, but to Simone he was nobody. She was completely ignorant of who he was. She likely thought he was some sad alcoholic who wore black eyes or a freshly broken nose as often as he wore a smile when he came to see her. She probably pitied him. Which struck him as especially funny given that, if he wanted, he could buy her store, her house, and her honor in a single transaction. It was an odd comfort, being pitied by someone as pitiful as her. 

She was one of the first people he’d met when he came to Paris. She was the first to tease him about his american accent, and the first to notice as his French improved. Odd as it was, this blonde shop girl who knew nothing about him was the most constant, reliable thing in his life since coming here.

“My dad is visiting,” he explained simply, taking the cigarettes and pointing to a stack of newspapers behind the counter. She handed him one.

“You don’t get along with your father?”

Jim flipped through the newspaper, spreading it out on the counter. “Not anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. He looked up from his daily scan of the headlines. Her eyes were round and clear, almost cartoonish. “That’s so sad.”

There didn’t seem to be anything about him in the newspaper that day. He didn’t know if that was a relief or a disappointment. One of these days, he knew, Simone would open up the shop, cut the tie off that morning stack of papers, and see his picture on the front page. He imagined her cartoon eyes going wide with horror when she realized who she’d been batting her eyelashes at for the past year.

He closed the newspaper and folded it up again, handing it back to her, then leaned over the counter himself. He mimicked her posture, his chin in his hand.

“Do you flirt with all the men who come in here, or just me?” He asked, just like he did nearly every day.

“Just you, Jim.” She replied, the same as always.

“Are you lying to me, Simone?”

“Maybe.” She smiled so much he wondered if her cheeks were sore at the end of the day.

He straightened up again when another customer came in, upsetting the familiar calm of the quiet shop. The newcomer went to the magazine stand and perused, but Simone looked annoyed by his presence too. 

“Do you know? You’re the only person in the world who lies to me and gets away with it.” Jim pitched his voice low, fixing her with a look he normally reserved for men about to get punched in the jaw.

“Is that right?” Her grin faltered slightly. He didn’t know why he did it, why his reaction to this innocent girl flirting with him was to try to scare her. He liked when she treated him like he was just a normal person like she was. But there was some part of him that grated under her attention, because he knew that his attractiveness in her eyes wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny. 

In her eyes and the way she spoke he could see every foolish fantasy in her mind. She was transparent. She imagined him tamed by her beauty, turning his back on whatever harsh life she imagined he was leading so that he could be molded by her hands into the ideal ex-villain boyfriend. Every woman adores an ex-villain. 

“Good luck with your father,” she said as he turned to leave. 

He stopped short. “Yeah. Thanks, Simone. I’ll see you tomorrow.”


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jim has a chat with his Dad

Jim pulled his jacket tighter around him as he walked into the hotel, as if a jacket could protect him from the coldness of his father. His stomach grumbled and he knew he should have eaten something before going, but his appetite had been absent for the past two days knowing what was coming. 

He never felt so small as when he walked into his father’s office, whether that office was a corner booth of some secret diner, or a penthouse suite perched at the top of a famous hotel booked under a made up name. The man was a presence all his own, the venue made no difference at all, he could make a luxury suite feel like a windowless interrogation room with just a cutting glance. Despite his years of practice in being as emotionally removed as his dad, Jim’s heart thudded in his chest as the elevator dinged at the top of the hotel and he stepped out into a wide foyer.

“Have a seat, Jim. He’ll be ready for you in a few minutes,” a beautiful brunette said in an American accent. It’d been so long since he’d heard an american that it actually sounded oddly foreign to his ears. He could swear he’d never set eyes on this girl before, but she seemed to know him. Jim thought of all the times he’s listened to people talk about how much he looked like his father, and what a chip off the ol’ block he was, and he grimaced.

“Like hell I’ll take a seat. He told me ten o’clock. It’s ten o’clock now.”

“He’s just in a meeting with--” 

He didn’t wait to hear the end of her explanation, instead bursting into a side door blindly. His father was seated at an enormous black desk in a leather wingback chair. His hair was thinning, the scalp underneath his combover gleaming like the polished wood of the furniture. 

“Jim, did Janet let you in already?” the older man asked, pulling a golden pocket watch from his vest.

“No.”

James Sr. gave Jim a smile that could only appear friendly to an idiot. The other man in the room, someone Jim didn’t know, twisted awkwardly in his seat at the palpable tension between father and son.

“Maybe I can leave now and come back later,” the stranger said, rising from the seat.

“No, no. Jim will wait.” James said

“No I won’t.”

“I’d really better go.” the stranger looked desperate to get away now, rising fully from the chair and putting his hat on his head. “I’ll be in touch.”

James stood up quickly to see the man out. He didn’t actually glare at Jim, but the glare was implied when he decidedly did not look at his son while he sat back down and shuffled through some papers on the desk.

“Did you summon me here to watch you pretend to know how to read?”

James scoffed but then continued to ignore Jim for another few moments before, with an air of leisurely impatience, he leaned back in the chair and steepled his fingers together. Jim wanted to roll his eyes but settled for a wry lift of his eyebrows.

“I’m just curious, Jim, if you think that the shit you get up to here in Paris isn’t getting back to me?” James finally said, sitting completely still in his chair.

“Well, what’ve you heard?”

“Why don’t you sit down?”

“I don’t think I will.” Jim resisted the urge to fold his arms over his chest petulantly and instead he shoved his fists in his pockets. Still petulant, but at least he felt slightly less like the fifteen year old boy that his father still thought of him as. He’d been through the “why don’t you sit down” act before. He knew every line by heart. His father would tell you to sit down, then he himself would stand up. He’d come around the table, maybe lean against it, and now he could look down his nose at you while you sat there, looking up at him. He’d loom over you, make sure you felt the weight of his power while he vaguely threatened you into doing whatever he wanted you to do. Jim wasn’t having it. And he wasn’t going to be spoken down to anymore.

“I sent you here to take over operations at the shipping yard. You aren’t a boss. You don’t get to make decisions. You answer to me. Always” James said, getting to his feet and approaching his son. James Sr. was taller than Jim, but the effect wasn’t the same when Jim refused to sit.

“Nice to see you too, dad.”

“The shipment in March was a full third smaller than expected and two weeks late. How do you account for that, Jim? I know you’ve been busy, maybe too busy, maybe too much time wasted on pulling stupid pranks. I know you and your boys nearly got caught with your last little jewelry heist. I take it that extra money is to pay for the fifty kilos of cocaine you owe me?”

Jim laughed. “You think I stole fifty kilos of cocaine from you?”

“Well where is it?”

“Damn if I know,” Jim said and was met with a sudden stinging blow across the cheek. He fought the instinct to raise his hand to his face to touch where he’d been slapped, instead narrowing his eyes at his father, who was growing red in the face.

“It is your JOB to know!” James bellowed. Jim thought his father might rise to his tiptoes in order to tower over him just a little bit more. “Your laziness has cost this family thousands of dollars! You think I sent you here to fool around with your little buddies? I can yank you back to New York with a snap of my fingers and get you back where I can keep a better eye on you.”

That threat did more than any physical punishment could have. Jim’s mind instantly went to the friends he’d made and their plans to splinter off from the family business and create his own. Then, oddly enough, he thought of Simone. There was no shop girl who made eyes at him every morning in New York, and he’d miss that. James saw the hesitation on Jim’s face and the color in his face faded back to it’s usual pasty hue. He walked back to his seat with a smug look on his face that filled Jim with more rage than was appropriate for the moment, old anger bubbled up to the surface when he saw that smile, old resentments and fear.

“Jim, whether you stole it to make your own profit on or whether it just got lost in the shuffle from Turkey, you’re responsible for the missing merchandise. I’m through with giving you preferential treatment. If you want to act like a big man here in Paris, then you’ll be treated like one. Do you know what happens to men who steal from me?”

He said it with a steely, calm voice that Jim knew was much more dangerous than his red-faced tirades. Jim’s blood went cold at that voice, no matter how old he got. He watched silently as his father lifted the phone to his ear and, apparently, called the woman who had told Jim to sit in the foyer, with the instruction to “send in the boys.”

Jim briefly considered jumping out the window. There may have been a fire escape. But he was too slow, and soon three men were entering the room and closing the door behind them. In a matter of seconds he was being beaten to a pulp. He swung his fists out madly, landing blows blindly but not doing much to protect himself. In a flash, he caught sight of one of the men’s faces and, in a moment of clarity, Jim punched the man so hard in the nose that he felt a sickening crunch under his fist. The nameless man howled and for just a moment Jim felt like he’d won himself the upperhand. He was wrong. There was a glint of metal and then a searing pain across his nose and down his cheek.

“That’s good enough.” He heard his father’s voice, but it sounded far away through the blinding pain that ripped through him as he crumbled to the floor. He cupped his face, blood pooling into hands and dripping through his fingers onto the intricate tile of the floor.

“Look up at me, son,” he heard. In shock, and unable to stand, Jim obeyed.

“Have you remembered your place now?” He asked, eerily calm as Jim bled at his feet.

Jim spat blood onto his father’s shoes, but James only chuckled. “That’s my boy. Get to a hospital for that cut, if it gets infected and you die, you’ll never inherit my money, right? Can’t have that.”

Jim was hoisted up by his shoulders onto his feet. He could hardly see through the pain and the blood but somehow he was led downstairs and shoved into the backseat of a car headed God knows where.


End file.
